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Muddy Mysticism: The Sacred Tethers of Body, Earth, and Everyday is a heartfelt response to the lack of mystical literature by those who have chosen to be bound by the eros and gravity of family, love, work, and the world. It is a lyrical articulation of an emergent feminist mysticism. Through prose and poetry, it explores the possibility of direct experience with the divine beyond the bounds of a particular belief system. Natalie advocates that ordinary life in the modern world is not something to be transcended or escaped but is a mystical path in its own right. Muddy Mysticism offers consolation and a way forward for those who feel the truth and bewilderment that the German Jesuit priest, Karl Rahner, touched upon when he said that the only way a person would survive with an intact faith in this century is by being a mystic. Natalie Bryant is an award-winning poet.
This is her first non-fiction book.
Excerpts
"If I’m on the right track and mysticism can be muddy, if every act is holy, then the divine is not excluded from any part of life (or death) and the face of the sacred is here in the tired and sagging sidewalks, in the panoply of greys, in the flit and flight of pigeons, in the absence of clean air."
"My body is a mystical text. No one else can reclaim the spaces within these walls."
"Gather rocks.
Bang them together
to see what sparks fly
from this sort of prayer."
"Life is a long and rugged prayer that can encompass even the most mundane of hours."
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